The New Regressive Dark Ages Arrogance, wealth, and received authority are always the super-spreaders and force-multipliers of false knowledge, and none more so than in the present age. By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/30/the-new-regressive-dark-ages/

Once upon a time long ago, we agreed there were certain immutable laws of human nature. These laws were based on facts, reality, and data. 

In other words, we accepted common sense about the way the world worked according to logical and even “scientific” principles. That assumption defined us as “enlightened” rather than Dark Age reductionists and ideological- or myth-driven zealots. 

Not now. “Progressives,” especially the media, are most often regressive, anti-Enlightenment, and intolerant people, who start with a deductive premise and then make the evidence conform to it—or else. 

Regressives

For example, we used to believe that if the government printed more money without commensurate sudden rises in population or economic output, inflation followed. And money cheapened in value all the more so if the government simultaneously both incentivized labor non-participation through over generous entitlements, and promised or enacted higher taxes and more regulations. The latter inevitably would discourage production as demand from a stimulated economy rose. 

In 100 days, we’ve either done all of those things or, at least sent messages to producers that we shall do so shortly. Why then are we surprised that monthly consumer prices are spiking after nearly 20 years of very low inflation? Why are our essentials such as lumber, gasoline, housing, appliances, and food skyrocketing? Is the current idea that there is no science of economics? Or is inflation good by “spreading the wealth” through decreasing the value of money for those who have too much of it? 

Deterrence is also an ancient law. Humans make instant cost-benefit analyses and act accordingly—from nation states that weigh the advisability of war to potential criminals who gauge the chances of their arrest and punishment. 

In deterrent terms along the border, what happens if the United States signals Latin America and Mexico that it will cease construction on an effective border wall, promise in advance blanket amnesties, reinstate “catch and release” rules, stop prior efforts to recalibrate easy “refugee status,” and pull back from detaining unlawful border crossers? Logically, would not potential illegal immigrants believe that the rewards of U.S. healthcare, safety, housing subsidies, entitlement support, education, and even affirmative action outweigh the increasing unlikelihood of meeting resistance at the border—or any later consequences for residing illegally in the United States?

The result is now true “chaos” at the border. Tens of thousands of unvetted immigrants illegally stream into the United States, in a fashion that is not diverse, not legal, not meritocratic, and not measured—the old foundations of rapid melting-pot assimilation. 

Did the Biden Administration simply by fiat declare that such obvious human laws did not apply to their superior moral impulses? Or did it deliberately violate them to change the demography of the American southwest in ways that eventually will benefit the hard Left? Likewise, could it be that rising crime is due to efforts to defund or cut back police forces, or allowing criminals to be freed without bail, or district attorneys not prosecuting crimes deemed matters of social justice.

Moms Learn Lengths to Which a School Board Will Go to Silence Complaints About CRT and Masks. You’ll Want to Sit Down for This … By Victoria Taft

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/victoria-taft/2021/05/29/moms-learn-lengths-a-wa-school-board-will-go-to-silence-complaints-on-crt-and-masks-youll-want-to-sit-down-for-this-n1450563

It’s hard to single out the most absurd part of the story of what happened to three moms who signed up to speak about critical race theory (CRT) and mask mandates at the school board meeting in a small southwest Washington town.

Was it when board members picked on one of the parents and then blamed a “disruption” on her?

Was it when the parents were locked out of the meeting?

Or was it when the cops were called?

It’s such a target-rich environment of outrage that it’s hard to know where to start. But let’s give it a go.

The three moms, Tatyana Stepanyuk, Patricia Bellamy and Melissa Mcilwain, signed up to speak at the Washougal, Wash., school board meeting on May 11. The town sits on the Columbia River just across from Portland.

The three signed up to address mask mandates at the schools and critical race theory being added to the curriculum under orders from Governor Jay Inslee.

But they never got to speak.

The sparsely attended in-person meeting, which was also broadcast online, barely got off the ground before the school superintendent and her underling insisted that the one person in the room without a mask should put one on. Stepanyuk invoked the governor’s words that she wasn’t required to wear one due to medical and religious exemptions. She noted that everyone else had a mask on so they were protected, no problem. Yet, the masked officials spent their valuable meeting time pedantically explaining to the woman how she needed to comply. But for the actions of Superintendent Mary Templeton and the board disrupting the meeting it would have progressed as normal. But that was not to be. Instead their superintendent and board caused a cluster storm of reaction from which the district may not soon recover.

Stepanyuk’s friends, Bellamy and Mcilwain, wore masks but told the superintendent that they had no problem with her not wearing one, assuming that transmitting the COVID virus was the school official’s concern.

It wasn’t.

For more than 20 minutes, the superintendent, assistant superintendent, and a board member took turns standing over the woman and lecturing her. Stepanyuk took video of the last eight minutes of the lecture, calmly recited the law, and remarked about how she was sorry that these educators hadn’t educated themselves about the mask law.

How Memorial Day began and how it was transformed By Eric Utter

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/05/how_memorial_day_began_and_how_it_was_transformed.html

Sadly, many people — especially younger folks — don’t even know why we celebrate Memorial Day, let alone how and where the commemoration began. It is an interesting, and moving story, indeed.

The roots of the remembrance reach back to Civil War days. As the war that took the lives of 620,000 Americans neared its end, thousands of Union soldiers, being held as prisoners of war, were placed into camps around Charleston, South Carolina. Conditions at one of these camps, a former racetrack near Charleston’s Citadel, were so bad that more than 250 prisoners died from disease and exposure. They were buried in a mass grave.

Three weeks after the Confederate surrender, on Mayst, 1865, over 1,000 recently freed slaves, accompanied by regiments of the “U.S. Colored Troops,” as well as a handful of white Charlestonians, entered the camp. They created a proper burial site for the Union dead. Then they gave readings, sang hymns, and distributed flowers around the new cemetery, and dedicated it to the “Martyrs of the Race Course.”

In May of 1868, General John A. Logan, the commander-in-chief of the Grand Army of the Republic, a union veteran’s group, issued a decree that May 30th should become a nationwide day of commemoration for the soldiers that died in the recently ended Civil War, also known as the War Between the States. General Logan dubbed this official remembrance, “Decoration Day,” and encouraged Americans to lay flowers and decorate the graves of the war dead across the land. Many believe that he chose May 30th because it was a rare day that didn’t fall on an anniversary of a major Civil War battle.

Originally, the holiday was only intended to commemorate those killed in the Civil War, and, by 1890, every former Union state recognized Decoration Day as an official holiday. After the United States entered World War I, the tradition was expanded to include those killed in all America’s wars.

In 1964, Decoration Day was changed to Memorial Day, via federal law.

AT PENN MEDICINE COMMUNITY- MORE WOKE AESCULAPIUS

Subject: CPUP Pledge Campaign – Support and Stand up against Systemic Racism and Racial Injustice

Anti-Racism Pledge

As part of the Penn Medicine Community, the CPUP Antiracism Committee is committed to advancing racial equity and justice. We encourage you, your friends, colleagues, and leaders of this organization to sign the pledge to stand with those who have faced injustice based on the color of their skin.

Join us and sign the pledge!

I pledge to address the injustices that stem from systemic racism within our health system and university. I understand that some power structures are designed to oppress and keep us from uniting as a nation of justice for all.

·         EDUCATING myself on our country’s racist historical foundation and striving to understand all systemic racism and racial injustices.

·         Having an UNDERSTANDING of white privilege and speaking up whenever faced with racist remarks

·         LISTENING to marginalized community members with intention and engagement

·         SUPPORTING a workplace culture that can become increasingly equitable and just

·         ACKNOWLEDGE my own privilege and power and utilizing it to deconstruct oppression and hold my community accountable

I will commit to actively support and stand up against systemic racism and racial injustice.

US is chasing China’s tail on 5G Super-fast data speed is not the point. The future is in robots talking to each other and response is the key David Goldman

https://asiatimes.com/2021/05/us-is-chasing-chinas-tail-on-5g/

NEW YORK – Chinese manufacturers have installed about 5,000 private 5G networks and will add tens of thousands more this year as 5G broadband enables Fourth Industrial Revolution applications, according to mainland industry leaders.

China already has 70% of the world’s installed 5G base stations and 80% of the world’s 5G smartphone users.

The global chip shortage and US sanctions against Chinese telecom equipment firms such as Huawei and ZTE have slowed China’s 5G buildout to some extent but 5G infrastructure already covers all of China’s major cities. 

China will add between 500,000 to 800,000 new 5G base stations to the 792,000 in place at the end of February, according to industry sources. 5G’s impact on productivity as well as profitability will come from downstream applications, not the network buildout as such. 

“It doesn’t make any sense for the West to pour billions of dollars into alternatives to China’s 5G technology,” one Chinese executive told Asia Times.

“It’s too little too late, and it focuses on the wrong areas. Trying to invent an alternative ecosystem isn’t going to work. I would have expected the United States to say, ‘Let’s transform industry, let’s be more competitive.’

“The US is great at analytics with firms like Google, Microsoft and Amazon. That’s what should have been done.”

5G, as I argued in my 2020 book You Will Be Assimilated: China’s Plan to Sino-Form the World, is the railroad of the 21st century – a carrier technology whose importance lies in the other technologies it makes possible.

Another teacher stands up against wokeness, this time in Louisiana By James Stansbury

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/05/another_teacher_stands_up_against_wokeness_in_louisiana.html

The Family Research Council (FRC) published an article, “Unequally Woked: One Teacher’s Stand to Stop the Left” that warns there is a stealth woke indoctrination process hidden within a BrainPOP animated teaching aid intended for K–12 schools.  However, the hundreds of BrainPOP video titles on their webpage BrainPOP that I quickly scanned appeared mostly harmless.  The one sample video that was available last Friday for viewing explained the origins of Memorial Day.  It was in a short, simplistically animated format similar to those produced by PragerU.  I found it both accurate and informative.

However, Jonathan Koeppel, a young, courageous teacher in the Saint Tammany Parish school district in Louisiana, where the use of BrainPOP videos had been approved, “knew something in his classrooms was wrong — and if he didn’t say anything, he worried no one else would.”  “When I found out that kids in my community were being exposed to this wokeism — woke curriculum and woke education — I said somebody needs to expose it.  Somebody needs to let the public know what’s going on,” he explained.  “I just happened to be the guy to do it.”

According to the FRC article, “When Jonathan stood up in the school board meeting last month, his goal was to warn local parents.  Thanks to his powerful message that caught fire online and was picked up by Fox News and Newsmax, he said a lot more.  “A man cannot menstruate,” he argued when it was his turn for public comment.  “A man cannot lactate and breastfeed a child.  You cannot give birth if you’re a man.  If you want to be an adult and do whatever you want with your life, I’m okay with that.  Don’t push this ideology on children.  I’m not going to work in a district that’s okay with that[.] … Parents are already pulling their kids out of public school[.] …  Their going online is going to increase as this liberal ideology comes into our schools.  This isn’t a political indoctrination camp, okay?  It’s public education.  We want to teach education, not left-wing ideas that aren’t backed up by facts or science.”

The Biden administration is pushing divisive Critical Race Theory ideology, the lies in the discredited 1619 Project, and gender madness to indoctrinate our school kids in wokeness nationwide, so it should be no surprise that an otherwise fine resource like BrainPOP would be used to assist with the fundamental transformation process.  I fear that thanks to the radical left’s domination of our MSM, Hollywood, universities and even Big Business, most newly minted educators (including many school board members) are likely to have been fully indoctrinated with woke ideology and eager to share it.  Therefore, it will be difficult to protect our kids from exposure.  However, it will be impossible to stop the process if parents or courageous teachers like Jonathan Koeppel remain silent despite knowing there will be a price to pay in our cancel culture.

One recent example of the sort of educator resulting from the left’s indoctrination process is clearly demonstrated here.  This young white female Oregon teacher put it like this to her colleagues: 

If you’re not evolving into an anti-racist educator, you’re making yourself obsolete. … Our district is only getting browner and browner [with respect to students]. … Obviously, you can’t change your melanin, all right? But you can change your mind so that you can actually function in a district that is full of BIPOC [black, indigenous, and people of color] children. So if you’re being resistant, I understand that. But you’re gonna have to eventually come to the light.

Ministry of Truth 2.0 Cal Thomas

https://www.sunjournal.com/2021/05/30/cal-thomas-ministry-of-truth-2-0/

Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas is reportedly considering the development of tools that would help America’s children discern truth from lies and know when they are being fed “disinformation.”

The Washington Times, which first reported the story, says a department spokesperson declined to give details, but that more information would be revealed “in the coming weeks.”

Mayorkas might want to start by fact-checking his recent claim that the U.S. southern border is “closed.” He made the statement when news pictures showed waves of people crossing the border. Should kids believe him, or their “lying eyes”?

Should anyone, regardless of political party or persuasion, be comfortable with government telling especially children what they can believe and whom they can trust? This is what totalitarian states do. It’s called propaganda.

We are already inundated with political correctness, cancel culture and woke-ism. TV networks spend more time delivering opinion and slanting stories to particular points of view than what once resembled – if not objective journalism – then at least fairness.

The list of government officials who have lied is long and dates back to the founders of the nation. Some lies could be defended on national security grounds. Others were used to cover up wrongdoing or enhance the image of the one who lied.

Deception Wearing the Mask of Truth By Geoffrey P. Hunt

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/05/_deception_wearing_the_mask_of_truth.html

For Joe Biden/Kamala Harris devotees, the 2020 ubiquitous election lawn signs in my neighborhood read “Truth Hope Decency.”  While most of these moralizing bromides did not survive the winter, some are still implanted, reminders of how cheap political speech was soon enough self-repudiated.

Exhorting “Decency” was the refrain decrying President Donald Trump’s occasional crude and coarse cloudbursts, usually unfiltered via Twitter. Yet the substance of decency has eluded Joe Biden and his Democrat handlers, ushering instead a new era of grotesque depravities, where at the top Biden/Harris have endorsed, supported, and invited the unrestrained abject horror of drug trafficking, sex trafficking, and human trafficking via a deliberately porous open southern border, resettling unaccompanied children all across America.

Illegal alien sex and child trafficking continues with impunity under Biden’s open borders policy while a surge in overdose deaths from methamphetamine,and oxycontin laced with fentanyl — all managed by Mexican cartels given sanctuary by Joe Biden — merits a VP Kamala Harris response that “climate change is the root provocation for the border challenges, and Mexico should plant more trees.”

Decency? No, neither stupidity nor incompetence, instead an abomination and disinformation by design.

And why is the Biden/Harris regime, obsessed by race and cultural Marxism, aligned with BLM, and the fraudulent 1619 project — where modern-day slavery and indentured servitude, from the Mexican cartels to South Sudan to Communist Chinese subjugation of the Uyghurs, elicits nary a peep?

Where is “working class/lunch bucket union guy” Joe, whose executive orders and indifference have destroyed thousands of union jobs from pipelines to rare earth mining, induced Weimar Republic-style inflation on food, building supplies, and gasoline — all taxes on regular Joes and Marys? While Joe’s Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm tells motorists facing 1979-like gas shortages, “well if you drove an electric car gas shortages wouldn’t matter,” and his Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg touts riding a bicycle to work, accompanied by two black GMC Tahoe SUVs.

Working class Joe is seeing gas prices at the pump from less than $2.00 a gallon to over $3.00 a gallon in 100 days. Nice job, Joe, in knee-capping your favorite constituents. Imagine if working class deplorables were loathed and ignored.

A Realistic Monument to Heroism The Korean Veterans Memorial pays tribute to former servicemen through a plain-spoken acknowledgment of the harshness of war By Tunku Varadarajan

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-realistic-monument-to-heroism-11622233360?mod=opinion_reviews_pos2

The Korean War ended more than two decades before the messy conclusion of the war in Vietnam. And yet a memorial to that earlier, “forgotten” war was dedicated only on July 27, 1995, 13 years after the completion on the National Mall of a wall of polished granite, etched with the names of those who died in Vietnam.

Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington—once so polemical—is now thought by many to be as close to reverential perfection as a war memorial can be. It has had fierce critics. Jim Webb, a Vietnam vet and U.S. senator, called it “a nihilistic slab of stone.” The wall is stark, even accusatory, and a bronze sculpture of three soldiers was added later to shush those who regarded Ms. Lin’s creation as too cerebral—even insufficiently heroic.

As if determined not to stoke such controversy, the Korean Veterans Memorial is, by contrast, stubbornly literal. A demotic American masterwork, it is plain-spoken and realist. It appeals to old-fashioned conceptions of what is heroic and admirable. Unlike the Vietnam Memorial, which yields its richness to those who meditate before it, the Korean Memorial fills even a child with awe—and it does so instantly, on first contact, as I found when I took my son to see it when he was 10 years old, a full decade ago. There is no sight quite like that of a small boy transfixed before statues that tower over him.

The monument—designed by Cooper-Lecky Architects of Washington—has many elements, including a Pool of Remembrance and a low-slung United Nations Wall that lists the 22 countries that joined the U.S. in its “police action” in Korea. Another wall, listing the names of the Americans who died, will be completed next year.

The monument’s true heart is a triangular “Field of Service,” on which stand the sculptures of 19 soldiers, wrought in unpolished stainless steel, each man about 7 feet tall. Early models had them at 8 feet, but this size was thought to come much too close to glorifying war: At a foot less in height they are daunting to behold, but not superhuman; larger than life without surpassing a likeness to it.

The statues are “a case of art rendering argument superfluous,” wrote Benjamin Forgey, architecture critic of the Washington Post, in an early review of the monument. Called “The Column,” they are an irrefutable statement on the harshness, the dread, and the team spirit of battle.

Not Forgotten A revival of Memorial Day traditions and an enduring example of bravery. By James Freeman

https://www.wsj.com/articles/not-forgotten-11622231865?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

After the dismal Covid spring of 2020, many Americans are eager to resume their communal displays of gratitude for the people whose sacrifices have allowed us to live in freedom.

“Memorial Day Parade returns Monday,” notes a headline in The Telegraph newspaper of Alton, Ill. No rain is expected and the parade will follow its traditional route. It seems the town’s tradition proved too strong even for Covid. The Telegraph’s Ron DeBrock reports:

The Alton Memorial Day Parade is one of the longest consecutive Memorial Day parades in the nation, dating back to 1868.
Last year COVID-19 concerns prevented the East End Improvement Association from hosting the parade. A small group, however, decided to meet at Alton Middle School for an unofficial Memorial Day procession. Word of the plan spread, and nearly 40 decorated vehicles participated in the extemporaneous event.

This year, such events are returning to normal. On America’s East Coast, volunteers have once again planted 37,342 American flags on Boston Common to honor all those from Massachusetts who have given their lives defending our nation since the Revolutionary War. Last year only a thousand flags were planted as the state imposed significant Covid restrictions.

Charlie McKenna reports for the Boston Globe on the families of the fallen who have come to honor their dead:

Melida Arredondo, whose stepson Alex was killed in Iraq in 2004, said fellow Gold Star families who take in the display share a unique connection.
“Being out here seeing the other families – there’s a bond. You might not even know the other family’s first name or whatever, you just remember the kids,” she said.
She said it was a profound feeling “just to be here and honor each other as those who have lost their loved ones, honoring the troops who have lost their compañeros, and honoring those from Massachusetts who have died for liberty.”